We had the pleasure of featuring our Psychometrician Liberty Munson on two tweetchats this week! For each one-hour chat, she was the voice behind @MSLearning. Our Twitter followers asked many great questions about certifications and exams. Liberty shared fascinating, behind-the-scenes facts about our exam development process, and also offered exam prep tips. Missed the tweetchats? We've got you covered. Simply replay them below and take notes. (Did you spot the picture of her dog Zenith?)
And... Liberty has joined the 21st century and started her own Twitter account! You can follow her @LibertyMunson, and chat her up about work, reading, outdoor adventures, etc.
This week's tweetchats were inspired by our community's wonderful responses to the Ask a Certification Expert (ACE) video series. You can find the entire playlist here. Subscribe to our channel while you're there because more new videos are coming! Got a question you want to have answered in an ACE video? Post it in a comment below, and you just might get an answer + a shout out in our next video!
Replay of the May 16 session:
Replay of the May 17 session:
One question that I didn't see asked and that I find puzzling...do current Microsoft exams use adaptive technology? I know that on the exam guide pages it says that they can, but do they? I've had several peers recently who've insisted that the exams they were taking behaved like adaptive exams, i.e., focusing on certain areas where the tester seemed weaker while ignoring other areas. But if you look at the percentage breakdown of the knowledge domains, I don't see how they could be adaptive without going outside of those percentage. In other words, if it says that 17% of the question are on topic X, how could they adapt and ask more questions without going over that 17% or reducing the number of questions in some other category?
Hi Kevin,
We currently do not use computer adaptive tests. In fact, few certification programs use it anymore because candidates are not convinced that I can tell if they are qualified with as few as 10 questions! So, the level of dissatisfaction with this delivery method has led to it falling out of favor in many programs. This doesn't mean that we won't use it at some point in the future or that I won't think of a creative way to leverage the ideas behind CAT to minimize the number of items I need to deliver to determine if a candidate is qualified or not.
If we did decide to use CAT, we'd still sample from the content domain in the approximate proportions listed in the prep guide--we have to if we want a valid assessment of your skills in that content domain.
Thanks for the question!
Thanks Liberty! Informative as always.
Can anyone speak to exam retirement? I've searched all over the Microsoft Learning pages to find a site that lists retired exams and dates for upcoming exam retirements, but can't find anything. Every page that I've found referencing retirements says that retired exam and pending retirements can be found on this page: www.microsoft.com/.../exam-dev.aspx but that page doesn't list anything about retirement.